Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Thursday August 02, 2012 @09:28AM
from the there-goes-the-miniatures-industry dept.

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an article at Geek.com "A team of computer scientists at Harvard University have developed a piece of software that allows anyone to 3D print their own action figures at home. Not only will the models carry the likeness of the character, they will also be fully articulated. The software can take an animated 3D character and figure out where best to place its joints. In what is referred to as reverse rendering, the software first looks at an animated character's shape and movement and identifies the best joint points (original paper, paywalled). It then adjusts the size of the different parts of the model so as to allow a real joint to work once printed. Optimizations are then carried out to produce a model as close as possible to the on-screen version, but at the same time workable as an actual real-world, articulated 3D model."
The bad news: Harvard is patenting everything and wants to commercialize it on a proprietary basis. The good news: An anonymous reader pointed toward the paper in full.

i think OP in this thread meant he's tired of people patenting things and commercializing them when they start with a technology like 3d printing that is designed for openness.
But i could be wrong too

3D printing is no more "designed for openness" then printing or writing or singing. There have been 3D printers long before the reprap, and just because a part of the community thinks that no one except sellers of circuit-boards and metal pipes should be making a profit, doesn't mean that everyone else have to give up all hopes of generating a profit in 3D printing. They don't create stuff like this to make money, they however do need to make money to keep making stuff like this.

I don't agree with software patents. I think they are unenforceable and generally for things that are beyond obvious (one click payment). But, this strikes me as more than that. They have done something non-obvious that creates something in the physical world and has value beyond just the source code. I think that should be patentable. I (or any moderately talented programmer) could create on click payment very quickly and easily. I could not just knock out automated fully articulated action 3d printa

you miss the point. You copyright the code - no one can just steal and use it. But if someone else smarterthan you can do the same thing on their own they should be able to - but a patent would prevent that. Take yourexample of "one click" you say it is easy for you so it shouldn't be patentable, but 99% of the populationcouldn't do that.

Just about everything in 3D printed is patented. RepRap people just don't care about it. It's very hard to sue a community. Even the name for the most commonly used 3D printing method is trademarked. (Fused deposition modeling(tm) by Stratasys)

It's somewhat long, but a one-line summary of what they concluded could be roughly:

At least in the UK and EU, there is no strong legal basis for constraints on non-commercial personal 3D printing.

It's worth reading the whole thing though, as it covers many different forms of legal restrictions on object replication. It certainly foresees problems ahead for commercial companies in this area, but provi

Just about everything in 3D printed is patented. RepRap people just don't care about it. It's very hard to sue a community. Even the name for the most commonly used 3D printing method is trademarked. (Fused deposition modeling(tm) by Stratasys)

Patents related to FDM-style printing have been expired for years. "Fused Deposition Modeling" is a trademark, but that's just a name for the technology, not the technology itself. An open name for describing the technology is "Fused Filament Fabrication" which sounds silly but it avoids that whole trademark business.

Why? Do you think the countless hours and piles of money they sank into developing this came from the tooth fairy?

if you don't like this you are welcome to put together a team, come up with a product, put it on kickstarter, and see if you can get enough people interested to get it made. It has never been easier for those with a new idea to get that idea turned into reality in our entire history, but just because you want to give away your time and money doesn't mean other people have the same opinion.

Why? Do you think the countless hours and piles of money they sank into developing this came from the tooth fairy?

While federal funding has been cut, they do receive federal funding. Until that reaches 0% of their income I am against them being able to patent their inventions, which should belong to The People, not used for profit so that they can overpay administrators.

Also by me, as a shorter version of the above:http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html [pdfernhout.net] "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In o

So how would the AFAA (Action Figure Association of America) implement some kind of DRM on action figures anyways? Would they try to force a blacklist of designs onto every 3d printer?
Too bad for them the first thing I'm printing out is an army of pirates.

Actually if you paid attention they DID have money in the Star Trek universe, it was just "credit slips" or in the case of Voyager they used replicator rations, which Paris always had a betting pool going with those as currency. If things were to progress like Star Trek most likely just as in ST it would be the things you can't replicate that are valued, such as latinum was prized over gold and diamonds precisely because you could replicate gold and diamonds but not latinum.

Depends on the print resolution. The higher the resolution, the higher the printer price. Low resolution designs like MakerBot are cheap, and can be bought/built by almost anyone.

Also, with hackerspaces popping up all over the place, many people gain access to expensive tools like high end printers.So you could design at home, and then go print it out. Like how we used Kinkos in the 90's.

First of all, the shark doesn't do the jumping. Second, how do you buy action figures that aren't available for sale, like cartoon characters from obscure TV shows? Third, it's a nascent technology, so give it time to mature.

Fast and cheap to buy a completely custom action figure? Yeah, I don't think they have those at Toys'R'Us.

One-step articulated toys have been my standard example of "really impressive shit 3D printing could someday do" for years. I just hope that Harvard's fucking patents don't prevent anyone else from doing it better and more affordably.

Anyone who actually goes to collector sites like One Sixth Warrior or Sideshow (Freaks) Collectors knows there are already people doing this. I've seen many zbrush sculpted, 3d printed custom head sculpts for high end collectables.

Or, it's good for the marketplace in that there will be more choice for consumers and lower prices all around, with a lower cost of entry to those who wish to produce. The industry will also have a larger, cheaper talent pool to select from, lowering their costs. Markets will open up for custom parts that didn't exist before. LOTS of money will change hands, stimulating the economy. Lawyers will benefit because this surely will be a hotly litigated subject for the next few decades.

Harvard is supposed to be a non-profit entity and, unless I am mistaken, is tax exempt for this reason.

I think Universities should pay taxes right along with the rest of us. Fuck 'em. They should get deductions for scholarships but they should be paying tax on all their profits, just like any other greedy money hungry bunch o' sumbitches.

Humans have an innate ability to comprehend the spatial organization of an object and to replicate it in another medium, even to scale it automatically. Most of us are not expert sculptors and so we would do a rather poor job of it, but nevertheless, the ability is inherent in us all.

The so-called "reverse rendering" in the article is, again, just part of our innate object recognition ability. Without that ability, images would unrecognizable to us as 2D projections of 3D objects. The ability appears to

I can see how they determine joint location, my question is whether or not the joint type selection is automatic. I.e. The knees didn't appear to be pure ball joints, but more like pinned joints. the tail and neck were obviously pure ball allowing multi-axis rotation, but the knees looked like single axis joints.

3D-printing action figures is something that I've wanted to do for a while.
In case anyone with knowledge or expertise in printing action figures happens to read this, I'd like (1) to scan an existing, articulated action figure... somehow, perhaps using 123dapp Catch (123dapp.com), (2) to modify the resulting mesh using 3D modeling software such as Blender and (3) to make articulated 3D prints of the modified action figure.
Please share any advice, recommendations or links that might be useful. Thanks in

I foresee within the next decade that we'll see a major explosion of piracy of 3D models of popular toys. Why buy that 10 dollar Batman figure for your kid when you can download the 3D model and print out your own? And of course toy companies will freak out much like the record labels did.

This is going to be pretty interesting. If I owned stock in a toy company or whatever, I'd be thinking about selling it.

Unfortunately the Harvard gazette article and the summary fail to mention that this was joint work with Cornell and TU Berlin. The professor from Cornell involved is Doug James, famous for great work in animation and sound rendering (for which he was singled out in a hilariously misguided way by you-cut-government: http://www.livescience.com/9108-scientists-call-citizen-review-funding-misleading.html).